SEO HACKS FOR EVERY BEGINNER

Most of the writers and bloggers depend on SEO to get clients and followers. Today I decide to focus on simple tips which people that are just starting up with blogging should use in order to be able to reach more possible clients. A lot of writers that I know are self-published and most of their work is being sold directly from their websites and blogs through the use of woo commerce and other shopping cart integrations. So why not help you as the writer get more clients to your business?

Before I even started blogging, search engines were a big thing for me. And if you know anyone who has been in college or is still in college, they will tell you what the term GOOGLE means to them. Students nowadays don’t even go to the library to read and research for their projects and assignments. Why waste all the time while the information that you want was just a few clicks away from you on this very same screen that is staring at you straight in the face? Google is a powerhouse of information. You need anything? Google got it. That is why google as a search engine is Important to content creators, in this case bloggers. SEO is as simple as Site Engine Optimization. That is the simple act of trying to formulate your website or blog in such a way that Search engines will not have a hard time finding you.

In this blog post it will be focusing much on Google. Google is not the only search engine that is available in this world. Others include the likes of bing, baidu and yahoo but these only accounts to just 10% percent of the billions of searches that happen every day. The other 90% goes to google.

Bloggers are generally content marketers. They provide useful content to their readers and in exchange they will earn money from those that become their loyal fans. These fans may be converted to customers who buy the bloggers products, all customer who will buy products that this marketer approves of and hence the blogger earning some affiliate cash from it.

To make it big in the field of blogging, you will need to play by Google’s rules. Google is the boss here. If you don’t follow these rules, then google won’t care whatever high-quality content that you are pumping out. Then, this is where SEO enters. SEO calls both you and google and sits both of you down and tries to make both of you collude into helping each other out. You are responsible for providing content for google to index and then google is responsible for keeping a steady stream of readers flowing to your website.

Keywords are the thing that drives the search engines. To give you a taste of that, I went to google and searched for a 400 seconds time. Check it out:

(How cool is that?)

SEO: OPTIMIZING YOUR WEBSITE FOR GOOGLE

I know, for a beginner, the stuff that he or she is reading right now might seem like rocket science right now. Trust me, it’s actually not. This is the easiest thing that you will ever learn that will help you 200% in your blogging journey.

Well, I will agree that if I decide to dive straight in to the deepest darkest corners of SEO it might be tough. But right now, I am not going to do that.

Let me explain what happens when google ranks your blog among other millions of blogs.

Google has go these stuff that they call “spiders”. No, they are not the kind that you see and they creep you out. No. These spiders are used by google to crawl websites all over the internet in the internet. They search for things that might indicate that your website is good enough. This means any one of the following indicators and another over 100 other things:

Does your website have useful content?

Is your website loading time freaking slow or is it within the required parameters?

Do you update the content on your website every now and then?

Do you have any websites that link back to you?

Do you link to other authority websites?

I told you. This list is inconclusive. What google uses to rank your website could easily fill out a whole blog post. I will be doing a blog post real soon about this stuff.

SEO focuses in seducing these “spiders” into thinking that your website is the greatest thing that happened to the world.

To keep these little dudes happy, you need to do each of the following things:

1. OWN YOUR BLOG

Google spiders realize that if you are serious about the content that you are posting, then, you would not be the kind of a person who uses a free hosted blog. You would take your time to get your own hosting service. Which is totally inexpensive.

Google won’t tolerate a website whose host are crappy and are down most of the time. A great software that will allow you to check on your servers uptime is pingdom which will ping to tell you when your servers are down and at the end of each month you will get to be told the amount of time that your servers were up.

2. OPTIMIZE YOUR PAGE LOADING TIME

I am sure as hell you hate it when you head over to website waiting for the awesome content to load so that you can consume it, but then find that the page is loading real slow.

Even though you wanted to get to read the information contained there, you will pull back from that site to avoid wasting your time and go find the information elsewhere.

Google knows this. That is why they will stop ranking websites that load slowly knowing that every potential reader will potentially pull away from these sites even before they load up the content they contain.

To ensure that your website loads pretty Quickly, you will need to have a clean coded theme. Make sure that your theme is optimized for the search engines and make sure that it is compatible with smartphones and each and every other device, otherwise google will never rank you.

Premium themes are on the cheap nowadays.

3. POST QUALITY ORIGINAL CONTENT

This is a no brainer. Blogs thrive on content. Look at the most visited websites. What do they all have in common? You will agree with me that they host a lot of useful content. That is why even google has decided to give these websites a thumbs up by ranking them high up in their search results.

If you too want a portion of that, you need to start pumping out useful content.

4. BUILD BACK LINKS

This might somehow sound odd to you if you are a newbie in the field of blogging. So, I am going to try and define it for you.

Back links are the links that you get from other websites. In other words, it is when another blogger, it is when another blogger finds your content useful and decides to link to you from his or her blog or website.

Another way of getting back links is through commenting on blogs that you find useful on the web and guest posting. When many blogs link back to you, it will two things:

It will make google realize that your content is awesome

It will site a lot of traffic to your website

Disclaimer: don’t buy these back links, google is on the look put and may just find out and decide to burn you.

5. KNOW ABOUT YOUR VISITOR’S BEHAVIOR BY INSTALLING GOOGLE ANALYTICS

You will need to know about what your visitors are preferring. This can be actually achieved by actually watching your visitors from behind the scenes by the use of google analytics.

Get to know where the huge traffic is from. Get to know which blog posts go viral and which don’t.

6. YOUR URL STRUCTURE SHOULD BE SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY

Instead of using a url like:

http://www.mathengemaina.com/postid=2000

I use a url that contains the keywords that I want to rank for in the search engines:

http://www.mathengemaina.com/search-engine-optimization

If you are using WordPress, this can easily be changed by heading over to:

Dashboard==>>Settings==>>Permalinks

Disclaimer: don’t change past links, because if you already had back links, you are going to lose these.

7. RESEARCH THE RIGHT KEYWORDS FOR YOUR CONTENT

Keywords are the words that your potential readers are most likely to put into google when searching for content that you write about. If you are able to get to know what key words that your readers might use, you will most likely realize what to focus on while your write. This will allow you to rank high up in those specific keywords.

When your crafting your post titles it is great to try and use google search suggestion tool to get to see and know some of the long tail words that you might use in order to rank higher up in the search results:

This is easily done by eliminating your competition by the use of the long tail keywords. Check this out:

Searching for only beauty products gives 444, 000, 000 results:

But searching forbeauty products every woman should own brings the search results down to 9, 600, 000 results:

The long tail keywords every woman should own brought the results down to 9, 600,000 from 376,000,000. All those competitors were cut out.

8. USE SEO WORDPRESS PLUGINS

Yoast SEO is what I use and it does great stuff in terms of helping you in crafting your posts to be found by google.

9. MAKE SURE YOU USE YOUR KEYWORDS ON YOUR IMAGES

The images that you will put on your page, make sure that they contain the keywords that you want to rank on. These can be placed in the alt section and the title of the image.

10. CREATE A SCHEDULE FOR POSTING YOUR CONTENT

Your readers will be expecting your content. To make sure that you deliver, make sure that you create a schedule and stick to it. This could be a head ache. But with this awesome WordPress plugin you will stay right on top of your calendar:

WRAPPING UP

Well, there are my top 10 tips on how to rank on google. Got any more tips or a question? Add to the fun in the comments below.

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Who is Mathenge Maina?

Coffee addict. I like to create through words. When I am not writing i am most likely seen carrying some chemical engineering books or trying to figure out what the next big idea will be. I am just trying to change the world one word at a time. Read about me here.